The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

I've wanted to read A Woman in White for a long time but couldn't get my hands on it so I read The Moonstone instead. It starts out with a backstory of how the stone was stolen from an Indian shrine by a despicable British officer. The story proceeds to its' contemporary time and the stone (which has a curse on it) is being given to a young woman as a birthday present. Almost immediately the stone is stolen and the young woman acts very strange and suspicious about it's disappearance. A well-known policeman is called in and he proceeds to build a case against the young woman and another young woman who is a servant but has in the past been a thief. The story is told from different viewpoints like a compilation of statements so of course the reader never gets the larger picture. There's a couple of red herrings to cloud the identity of the true thief but finally (after 400 pages) the mystery is solved and young lovers reunited. The Moonstone is never recovered by the young woman or her family but makes it's way back to it's true place. I thought it was an OK story, there were some clever twists in the story but I found a lot of it kind of slow going. It was not as suspenseful and I would have thought. Also, there was something about the language that seemed forced or overly formal.